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Advertising will never go away. You pay for cable, yet cable still has ads. Micropayments could potentially be adopted as a short-term alternative, but if it were ever to become the status quo, publishers would just start adding advertisements on top. Then we'd have a system where we both pay money directly, and also have ads, which would be worse.

It doesn’t take that much machine learning to identify an ad and if micro payments were built into the browser they could be trivially tuned to only award payments on non-advertisers.

This wouldn't solve the problem is payment is required up front for the content.

You can participate with this now using Brave, a Chromium-based browser that uses cryptocurrency-based micropayments to pay for content while blocking adds: https://brave.com

The number one reason I dont pay for cable, but I do pay for Amazon prime video and I dont get adverts there, I assume Netflix is the same. If I was paying £50 a month for sky TV I would be annoyed at advertising being shown to me. I put up with adverts on free to air TV and am happy to pay a licence fee to the BBC for advert free television and radio. It's possible to provide a service that charges for access and doesn't show adverts as these options prove, however greedy media firms want to have their cake and to eat it.

>It's just wasted cycles because of the economics of the damn thing.

I think a lot of people miss that mining is zero sum when over the threshold that the network needs.

For example if mining hardware costs dropped by one half, people catch up and mine with twice as much computing power, the network increases the difficulty of mining by two, and the same amount of bitcoin is distributed and secured as was before the hardware innovation. You aren't mining more 'efficiently' with advances in computing power at the large scale.

But the trust in the system increases. By your logic we would need only one computer mining. It always takes 10 minutes (or so) anyway...

You do need a threshold, but I would argue the main risks to trust beyond that are in mining consolidation into powerful blocks, forks, etc.

Nobody would mine bitcoin in the browser in their right mind, it's a waste of resources. You would choose one of the coins made specifically for CPU/GPU mining only, no ASICs.

Mining doesn't have to be a cost efficient use of cpu cycles for the person browsing for this to catch on, it just needs to be a more cost efficient use of bandwidth and server power for the entity serving the ads.

Bitcoins are the consistently valuable and liquid coin, therefore it can make sense to serve bitcoin mining js.

If this ever catches on, i have even more reason to disable all javascript while browsing on my laptop and on battery.

As it is javascript is the number one reason for shit battery life, I don't want to make that even worse than the days of flash which its rapidly already become today.

Better off just closing your laptop then, as most sites rely heavily on JavaScript.

Really? My choice for the "modern" web is: no battery life or no web?

Faustian bargains like that aren't a great definition of progress.

until you hit SPA sites that need javascript to work.

That would be avoidable until I'm back on power.

Fundamentally the issue here is energy consumption while on battery. Without a way to say: a site can use N% of battery and then hard cap the usage down to a trickle and alerting the site that the user has limited energy resources available, I think this is a non starter.

Similar to when you are on LTE you don't want to use up limited bandwidth for say 4k video and want to say: you know what, I'll deal with this later and not go over my monthly allocation, the same applies here.

Is that view that unreasonable?

It will never be, and indeed nobody has bothered to make a bitcoin minibg js.

Why? Because each desktop CPU would only yield 20-30 megahashes per second, less if you don't want to slow the user's computer to a crawl. A server would need to manage millions of clients just to match a single ASIC miner which has efficiency rated in terahashes. And that amount of hash power would only return about 30 dollars in bitcoin on a good day.

This is why all javascript miners target Monero and the latter was often criticised for having a CPU-friendly PoW because this is just asking for botnets to form.

Of course not, but they can mine other coins that are more asic resistant.

> What fundamental good does spreading any PoW to millions or billions of devices accomplish? Nothing.

Well, if the owners of those devices control the mining they're doing, then it secures the network by preventing a 51% attack from any single miner with enough power. But in this case, only the website operator benefits by not having to pay for electricity.

Ads make content available to people with no money to spend. Restricting content to those who can pay, instead of paying by ad placement, is only going to further the divide between social classes.